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adamdb 3 minutes ago [-]
I once had an argument with a close friend of mine while earning her PHD in a non-computer engineering field. It was about the semantics of "Computer Engineering" and "Software Engineering", or any variant involving computers. Her argument was that every (virtually, I think?) other engineering discipline requires a certificate after graduation to ensure their competency. Every since then I've also argued for similar industry standard certifications for Computer and Software Engineers. I was a hiring manager for over a decade at a well known MNC, so I can attest that this doesn't, or didn't exist (since the global mass-layoff). I tried to improve interview standards in the past and help establish some forward momentum, but pulling-the-ladder-up and biased-hiring-practices have made this even more elusive.
spudlyo 8 hours ago [-]
So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.
Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.
ianbutler 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".
I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
dpark 5 hours ago [-]
> * Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent.*
I think this is largely a pay gap problem. There’s a bit of prestige involved (why work for random corp’s dev dept when you could work at FAANG) but a huge part is that most those random corps are paying way less. The best talent generally goes where the money is.
__MatrixMan__ 57 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like we could fix this if we did a better job of holding FAANG accountable for the sorry state of technology. So many needless social problems have been introduced by technology and it happened on their watch. That prestige... we could poison it.
Maybe working at FAANG should be something to be embarrassed of.
jonhohle 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe it’s not this way anymore, but VC backed companies played as good or better than FAANGs 10 years ago but it was a mixed bag of talent. I ended up at a place where the engineers hard largely come from a non-FAANG, but storied engineering culture that was different but had many analogous solutions to common problems.
The biggest problem with VC startups is their geographic concentration, but sometimes remote is available.
bryanrasmussen 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer.
I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.
hungryhobbit 5 hours ago [-]
I think he was being a little hyperbolic, but the core concern (that programmers look competent right up until you have them write a FizzBuzz) is very real.
(Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)
strken 3 minutes ago [-]
Fizzbuzz is interesting because it relies on either the candidate remembering the modulo operator, or the interviewer allowing them to write a modulo function. I can understand why a candidate could forget how to find the remainder from an integer division.
The bigger issue is not having seen fizzbuzz before, really.
foobarian 3 hours ago [-]
Sadly I have run into people like that. To this day I am convinced they paid someone to stand in for the interviews.
thejazzman 3 hours ago [-]
I'm probably the person ya'll are hating on.
Writing code and writing code under pressure while you have a full blown anxiety attack are not the same thing. I'm lucky if I can accurately tell you what I had for breakfast once that triggers..
jonhohle 2 hours ago [-]
If you program daily, but were nervous during an interview, I would have been able to tell and always tried to get candidates comfortable before getting into any programming - talking about something they liked or were passionate about, reframing my questions in terms of something we talked about or was on their resume.
I found most of the people who couldn’t program were not the nervous ones, but were smooth talkers who probably didn’t write much code. Maybe they did at one point, maybe they never did, it was hard to know, but I couldn’t get even logical steps to solve straight forward problems out of them. Those were the worst interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t a fit for the role, but because then I had to panic to try to keep the experience positive, constructive, and collaborative. When I expected to fill 20-40 minutes talking through a problem with someone who can’t solve problems, let alone produce anything remotely looking like code, I always found that painful.
The questions I asked could be solved by non-programmers (my wife, who was an elementary teacher and even my kindergarten son could come up with reasonable solutions, but of course not code). That was probably the biggest issue I ran into with nervous people - they didn’t think about the problem first, they’d try writing code before really thinking through. That was usually easy to correct and I didn’t fault anyone who could handle correction and guidance.
zelphirkalt 3 hours ago [-]
We really need to let go of the notion, that FAANG necessarily has especially skilled engineers. Their products indicate, that this is not the case. Look at what kind of shitshows Google search and YouTube are for example. Or how FB is only bots now. Do these things still rake in money? Yes. But that's rather due to history and entrenchment, than sheer quality of these platforms/tools. Something all of FAANG have failed at is content moderation. Their quality actually sucks.
Also I would like to add, that companies in general are quite clueless about how to hire good engineers and set up hiring processes, which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers. Someone not able to write a loop will be found out, but that doesn't mean they won't hire other types of mediocre engineers, instead of good ones, that they gave a pass. Don't forget, that often not even any engineer is involved in taking a look at someone's application or its contents. Often it is HR going off of checklists, which leads to them ending up with the people, who have fake CVs ticking all the boxes.
I wish companies were able to distinguish better, because then your point would stand, that talented engineers had far more leverage. Lately though, I have lost my faith in that.
baranul 2 hours ago [-]
> which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers
Part of that is also about who management and HR are socially comfortable with and candidates that may have connections with people in the company. It's often not a level playing field because of cronyism, nepotism, and many other -isms.
That's also why a good engineer, confident in their skills and value, needs to read the room or figure out what's going on. If the situation is not to their liking, then jump to another company or start their own business, whenever the chance presents itself.
bluefirebrand 2 hours ago [-]
> I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent
I don't think the management at most companies could identify good talent if it poked them in the eye. Good talent wants to have agency and freedom to act, the average manager wants to breathe down your neck at all moments
brailsafe 7 hours ago [-]
> I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.
Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.
autoexec 8 hours ago [-]
> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.
conqrr 8 hours ago [-]
This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives.
I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.
repeekad 8 hours ago [-]
If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.
kentm 4 hours ago [-]
The bill does come due. I've seen it happen over and over. But management fails to connect current problems to past mistakes, especially when they happen over the course of years. Thats setting aside when they insist that the correct decision was made, but have no real evidence that this is the case, other than the fact that "things worked out" even though maybe it would have been better had a different decision was made.
People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.
wk_end 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes.
...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.
enbugger 6 hours ago [-]
I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?
baranul 40 minutes ago [-]
> why "the speaker" has quit HN
Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall).
Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement in a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit can be had.
Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.
I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.
TimTheTinker 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I wasn't clear how his (lack of) religion/faith related to the theme. I like personal details shared thoughtfully in conference talks, but he structured the talk as if those details mattered to the overall message.
Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.
christophilus 7 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite talks.
sporadicism 6 hours ago [-]
I didn't find any of the arguments for optimism compelling, even if I wanted to agree with the talk's message.
Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.
nvme0n1p1 54 minutes ago [-]
What does your alternate timeline look like? Because I'm just imagining if Linux never took off, all internet servers would run Windows or a commercial Unix. That sure sounds like concentrated corporate power to me.
voakbasda 45 minutes ago [-]
Open source did that. Free software would have helped prevent it.
skinfaxi 4 hours ago [-]
> Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.
Can you elaborate on this?
spongebobstoes 7 hours ago [-]
I really enjoyed this. This talk contains a powerful message of optimism, possibility, agency and power that resonates strongly with me.
Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.
I love computers.
austy69 6 hours ago [-]
I loved the talk as well. The recommended music video by Ninajirachi was really cool as well! Have a good day fellow computer enjoyer :)
DangitBobby 7 hours ago [-]
I'm much more interested in a realistic bang for your buck discussion about software value for effort and diminishing returns rather than a conversation about whether it's possible to build great software.
Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".
Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.
nvme0n1p1 43 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I generally agree with him but there are plenty of fun counterexamples:
1. You go to the DMV to renew your driver's license at a kiosk there. There's a warrant for your arrest. Should the kiosk serve the user directly interacting with it and print out a new license anyway?
2. Grocery store: should a self-checkout serve the user and give them free groceries?
3. ATM: does the user get free money?
leecommamichael 8 hours ago [-]
> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently.
Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian, and I find that to be a message made in poor taste... which is difficult because this is such a potentially inspiring and positive talk. I lost the energy to be inspired by the talk due to this style of messaging, but I don't think you should have to. I'm just a bit thrown off, I guess.
Lerc 7 hours ago [-]
This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.
Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.
While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.
giantg2 5 hours ago [-]
"an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values"
This just seems normal and expected.
Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.
It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.
saghm 4 hours ago [-]
> Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.
> It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.
Right, but not everyone has the same reaction to members of the new generation who don't conform to their values. When my brothers and I didn't end up participating in organized religion as adults, even though my parents still are fairly religious, their reaction was basically "oh well" and to never bring it up again, and we all still have great relationships with them. There are people whose react to their kids not wanting to participate in the same organized religion much more aggressively, and if their kids have "lifestyles" that they consider immoral like being gay or trans, you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them.
You're not wrong that at a high level, the patterns are somewhat similar, but not all of them are the same magnitude. The values themselves will impact how volatile the conflict is because they're self-describing; parents who highly value tolerance will by definition not be as upset at having kids who don't agree with them on everything, whereas parents who instead place a higher value on conformity and adherence to tradition are going to be a lot less happy with kids who don't end up agreeing with them about that.
giantg2 4 hours ago [-]
"you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them."
Such is life. Not everyone has a family to begin with.
saghm 2 hours ago [-]
You called it "normal and expected". When not everyone has it happen to them, that's not "normal and expected". (It's not necessarily abnormal, but "expected" at the very least is a stretch).
lkey 5 hours ago [-]
"becoming an adult" is a thing people do, this will include no longer agreeing with everything your parents taught you. This is mundane and what you have described.
"my parents are/were abusive" is something a plurality of people (and especially those raised in evangelical churches) experience.
Within that dynamic, the 'value' at issue here is 'Do I, your child, have a right to my own body and choices?'; Too often, the reply to that is 'no, we expect obedience and obeisance to God, your father, and your mother, in that exact order, because that is the one true way'.
This is a form of domination, not well-meaning 'protection'. It does, in fact, 'mess people up', in their intimate relationships most of all.
giantg2 4 hours ago [-]
"have a right to my own body and choices?"
Not sure exactly what you mean by own body. However, under the law children generally do not have a right to their own choices and are expected to be controlled by their parents (really look at the stutes around this stuff and you might be surprised). After all, parents are held responsible for their child's actions under the law.
Lerc 1 hours ago [-]
Why do we allow people to teach a religion that requires someone to be old enough to have informed concent before they can decide to follow it for themselves, when at the same time we disallow sexual activity with those same individuals because they are not old enough to offer informed consent.
mdgld 1 hours ago [-]
I recommend you spend more time reading about jurisprudence. I’m not sure where you’re based, but in the US, for example, children below even age 13 can make autonomous decisions about their health when it’s determined that they have the capacity, even when the consequences may be life-ending.
And, less relevantly, I personally believe this is the most moral option in such situations. If you have a 15% 1-year survival rate, all treatments either come with a small decrease in mortality, a large increase in risk for detrimental side effects, or both, and you can demonstrate to me that you understand the interplay of these factors, I don’t care if you’re 10 or 100, I believe you should have the right to bodily autonomy.
31 minutes ago [-]
lkey 3 hours ago [-]
I am not surprised. I'm aware that the US never adopted:
You have stated an unfortunate fact while hiding your value judgement. Do you think the laws you reference are correct, or no?
Do you understand the difference between having a responsibility to prevent your child from law-breaking and having absolute control over their life in general?
If you have children, or plan to, do you want to control every action they take to protect yourself from hypothetical legal consequence? Do you think you have the right to do so? Do you think you should be able to control what they think and express as well?
These questions are not hypothetical, as an answer in the affirmative is precisely what creates the type of abuse I described above.
giantg2 3 hours ago [-]
The laws are to complicated to go into a full yes or no. But they mostly are. There are some things not covered by law which generally are controlled, such as the clothes, toys, and food bought for the kid.
mdgld 1 hours ago [-]
Except conservatism, religion, and religious conservatism in particular do not seem to value open-mindedness, discussion and consensus, or a non-judgmental stance.
It’s one thing to try and impart your values onto your children—that seems like what most parents would want to do, although I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s what they should do. It’s another to say, for example, “you were born with a penis and so if I see you wearing a dress I’ll beat you and send you to a camp where people demean you and question your innermost feelings until you change them or pretend to do so”, instead of having a conversation about gender vs sex vs sexual orientation, gender roles, society, and culture, and “nature vs nurture”.
leecommamichael 1 hours ago [-]
I appreciate the response, and I can relate. Perhaps I'm too sensitive to some rumblings I'm perceiving in the US at the moment. I don't know. I genuinely do not know.
jlhawn 7 hours ago [-]
I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.
edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.
joshcsimmons 8 hours ago [-]
This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place.
I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!
r2_pilot 7 hours ago [-]
From my perspective, I do not perceive the world as "falling apart" and I wonder how much of your perception of the state of things (as if there was a universally defined "perfection" to strive towards instead of humans creating these concepts) falling apart is derived from your faith, which has a vested interest in presenting itself as a real-feeling thing in order to promulgate its existence. As a meme, it appears to be persistent in the environment for roughly 2k years, so clearly there's some fitness to its host species. And contrast its feelings of apocalyptic end times to Buddhism, where things are more cyclical rather than ending soon, and I wonder how your feelings would be affected were you to have been raised in that environment instead.
foobarian 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like religion is the original corporation. You even have weekly 1-on-1s with your manager!
raspasov 42 minutes ago [-]
I don't often laugh on HN, but when I do, it's a big LOL.
zoobaloo 7 hours ago [-]
While I can't speak to the universality or novelty of the world falling apart, I feel the same way.
Some people aren't yet in a place to understand this perspective. Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. Some slander the faith based on ignorance or misunderstanding.
We're called to forgive our enemies and respond with patience, humility, and compassion. I've found that doing this without losing sight of God's commandments is a struggle that requires daily prayer and reflection.
Have a good weekend, and peace be with you.
slyall 26 minutes ago [-]
A thing you might want to consider is that how "good" a person is is largely independent from their level of religious faith.
It is common for religious people to assume they are linked and that a religious person does good deeds because they are faithful while somebody who does bad deeds has less faith.
Which leads to an assumption by some that atheists are have no morals and priest are exception good.
wofo 6 hours ago [-]
I liked the talk and was about to post a link to it in the $dayjob slack, but this threw me off as well. Still watched it to the end, and I still recommended it to a friend (along with the Youtube channel of the "Software should work" conf), but I'm saddened that the talk paints Christianity as something that is inflicted upon you and that you should strive to get rid of.
It's clear that he had a bad experience, and I'm nobody to tell him what to put on the slides and what to leave out, but my impression is that there are lots of believers out there who do cherish their faith, experience it as a very positive force in their lives, and draw from it the power to make the world a better place around them. Speaking for myself, I'd say faith has been a net positive so far in my life.
mdgld 1 hours ago [-]
You’re talking in general about your faith, when this presenter was talking about their specific experience of being raised by conservative Christian parents. I’m not even Christian, and it’s plain to me that there’s massive variation even within one denomination’s congregants, let alone a Baptist vs a Lutheran, for example. It seems like you extrapolated far beyond what he said.
crawfordcomeaux 4 hours ago [-]
What if we treat all religions as programming languages for humans? Then a degree program for programming humans at the Omniversity would likely put you through several different religions and then through syncretisms of them.
Most people don't want to learn, so they don't choose to live in the Omniversity.
SwellJoe 3 hours ago [-]
He shouldn't talk about his own experience? Why not? Why is it in poor taste to talk about a difficulty he went through?
leecommamichael 2 hours ago [-]
When you put it that way, I have no issue agreeing wholeheartedly. He’s making an example of incel culture as it appears to him to apply to software culture. After I describe it that way, I think he didn’t have to stoke the religious right in doing so. Something that hadn’t occurred to me until your reply (thank you) was that he might not be aware he’s doing that, and that is where I may be wrong in assessing the “taste” of the messaging. But I will be firm in my initial reason to post: knowingly aggravating each other is a problem in this country. We need compassion and mutual respect. Cooling the temperature of discourse will require a surplus in patience. Maybe even faith. (I am not religious, this is not a dog-whistle.)
I was so pre-occupied with someone being offended by what he was saying that I didn't see the clear positive angles you're showing. I appreciate that.
mdgld 1 hours ago [-]
I honestly don’t get what you’re saying. From my limited experience Mr. Kelley often adopts a confrontational stance, sometimes to the point of appearing antagonistic, but I listened past the intro and did not interpret what he said as “religion bad” or even “conservatism bad”.
It’s one thing to purposefully provoke people, and it’s another to tiptoe around any personal expression or hot-button issue for fear of offending someone, and that is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. I have been on all sides of this; I was raised by a computer scientist (used to speaking freely/veracity being valued) and a doctor (used to self-censorship/not offending being valued), and have worked in academia, industry, and now medicine, and have experienced conservative as well as liberal approaches to both promulgation and suppression of free expression.
RazorBucksICO 6 hours ago [-]
The man is running a slide deck in front of his colleagues that is full of crude graphics, memes, and, I guess some anime or something. It’s an unserious talk given by an unserious person for entertainment value. He dons the jester’s hat and signals his alignment with the monied San Francisco tribe to keep his easy job in an air-conditioned environment. If not, he might suffer the awful fate of having to earn his bread hanging drywall or driving a solid waste truck.
nvme0n1p1 24 minutes ago [-]
> He dons the jester’s hat
Or maybe it's not an act, and he's just naturally funny :)
> to keep his easy job
He had an easy corporate job. Then he quit and spent half a decade burning his savings to work on his "hobby project", in a belief that one day it would become useful enough that the project would become self-sustainable. Now he can afford air conditioning again. Should we not be congratulating him?
mdgld 60 minutes ago [-]
And what exactly do you do for a living?
SwellJoe 3 hours ago [-]
WTF are you talking about? He made Zig and is employed by the Zig Foundation, of which he is founder and president. He can't lose his job because he ruffles feathers.
RazorBucksICO 2 hours ago [-]
So he spends his time working on a hobby project and is completely supported by the charity of others? Do you see where I’m going with this?
SwellJoe 2 hours ago [-]
I do not. He spends his time working on a language used by and supported by several startups and a few major corporations, a language that seems heir apparent to C, at least among a lot of developers. The ICO in your name leads me to believe you're a cryptoscammer, so...seems like maybe you're not in a position to be throwing stones regarding how people make a living.
engeljohnb 2 hours ago [-]
The Linux Kernel is also a hobby project completely supported by the charity of others.
burner54828182 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t think he’s trying to gain your approval, if that’s what you mean.
leecommamichael 1 hours ago [-]
After reading some other comments on what I wrote, I guess I'm just surprised if/that he doesn't know this will offend people, and I see a simple way to make his point without doing so.
watwut 5 hours ago [-]
> Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian
Maybe, as a progressive, you should listen to the experience before rejecting it solely because "it is too divisive".
And if you reject personal experience and feelings solely because they are not pro-comservative-christians enougj, maybe there is issue there
leecommamichael 1 hours ago [-]
When you say "listen before rejecting," what would you have me do differently? To call what I'm saying "rejection" seems a bridge too far from what I am intending to say, also. I am making an appeal to civility and compassion in the event that he intended to say what he said knowing that people might feel badly by it.
philipp-gayret 5 hours ago [-]
He changed what he says his values are when dating women, to make dating woman easier for himself. Why he mentioned it, I don't know. He holds IMHO strange views on internet culture and portrays it as morally superior to not be part of any group mentioned; PUA/any forum/Christianity as a whole. A strange introduction for a software talk.
mdgld 46 minutes ago [-]
Idk how that was what you took away from the talk, and I think it says a lot about how you might approach dating, interacting with women, and personal values. He seemingly changed his views/approach to life and dating based on a re-evaluation of his values and experiences, whereas your framing makes me concerned that you believe the only way someone would/could become more attractive is by performing some sort of charade. It’s obvious when this is the case and I am aware of some people becoming frustrated by the experience, thinking that there is a “cheat code” to becoming more interesting/pleasant for others to interact with when it actually requires a radical rewiring of how you view and participate in social interaction; becoming more attractive is really just the side-effect.
Further, his views on PUA in particular might seem strange from the perspective of someone deep inside “internet culture”, and if this is you, from someone raised as a man, who is attracted to women, and who spent many years in the dark corners of the internet, please give broadening your horizons a try. You may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.
sh34r 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
keinzirp 9 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know what the "discord alternative" is that Andrew says he's working on at the end[0] of the video?
For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.
Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.
I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).
keinzirp 9 hours ago [-]
Thank you!
aljgz 2 hours ago [-]
This is exactly what I needed, ending my work week for the company, and transitioning to working on my own project over the weekend. Good to know I'm not alone, still dreaming of making things that serve people the way they (the people, not the things) want.
I hope I can get this out soon
jwsteigerwalt 4 hours ago [-]
After 3 years in a US public company’s IT department between 2013 and 2016, I had been working in private closely help companies with revenue between $100 and $500 million the last few years. Cashflow to invest in good systems and software, but conscious about investments.
I recently took a consulting engagement with another US public (pink sheets) company and remembered how dysfunctional some software development structures/cultures are.
flossly 6 hours ago [-]
I hope this guy gets an option to inherit the FSF.
But in a way that does not diminish his work on Zig.
staticshock 5 hours ago [-]
The comments here indicate a surprisingly, in my view, mixed reception, for such an unambiguously good talk?
The main thrust is simple:
- Technology is not good or bad, it is an amplifier of human values and our collective ambitions.
- Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.
- Believing this this is self-fulfilling. By embracing such beliefs you surrender your agency, which is what actually brings about dystopia. If you, instead, have a positive vision of humanity, then you are one of the people that drives society forwards rather than backwards.
We are currently at a moment in history where this message bears repeating.
A lot of things feel unstable, and as a result we have an opportunity to redefine the world in good ways and bad ones. Those who choose to redefine it in ways that are intractably bad will often do so from the point of view of a system observer, not a system participant. This is cope, because in reality everyone, whether they choose to accept it or not, is a system participant.
mdgld 41 minutes ago [-]
Wow. I have been really put off by seeing some of the vitriol he’s spewed lately, but this is a shockingly engaging and simultaneously thought-provoking talk. I’m totally going to riff on this in the future, for something completely unconnected to computer science and with credit, of course.
and while i'm not a massive fan of the music (not my kind of electronic) the mentioned Ninajirachi - Infohazard music video really is fucking cool (strobe warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c i definitely feel like my jaded oldtimer critic got called out there.
edit -- jfc, from one of the youtube comments
> From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”
mikewarot 10 hours ago [-]
So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means)
As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.
The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.
Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release
Sketch of a capability-based desktop environment
Right now, that's where my hope rests, it's been a LONG time coming, but I think Genode might become a widely used OS if they can pull it off. If they can break enough people out of being black pilled, that is.
I expected the link [1] to be to the explaination of what "black pilled" means, but only because I already read and remember xkcd 1053.
newsy-combi 8 hours ago [-]
Blue pill: The supplier of the thing you want is friendly and has your best interest in mind. (Suppliers can be corporations, government, the opposite sex,...)
Red pill: The supplier is corrupt and should be treated as such.
Black pill: You can't win against the corrupt supplier.
White pill: You can win/convert the supplier/find a good one in a sea of bad ones/find a complete alternative.
lightedman 7 hours ago [-]
"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time"
This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.
tptacek 7 hours ago [-]
OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.
javcasas 6 hours ago [-]
Why a collision? Abuse it where it is being used. Infect the chain of certificates that guarantees that the hash you are checking is actually the one you want. Send a million legit documents with bad hashes, so that the forged one looks like another legit one. Infect the library that calculates hashes so that these specific documents have a special hardcoded hash.
tptacek 6 hours ago [-]
Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).
javcasas 6 hours ago [-]
Well, if you are that picky, then you will have to wait. MD5 was created in 1991, the first collision was found in 2004.
tptacek 6 hours ago [-]
You want to pick a date and make a bet?
javcasas 5 hours ago [-]
You are the one discarding every date. I'll take the opposite bet: it will eventually happen, on some date.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
I haven't discarded any date. Pick one, and an amount to bet!
javcasas 5 hours ago [-]
> OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.
- Why a collision?
> Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).
Thus implying there are man-made systems that are not breakable, and furthermore SHA-2 is one of them.
> I haven't discarded any date.
Going back so quickly?
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, you've lost me. I was responding to the claim that any man-made system was breakable. The most obvious example of a man-made system that is unlikely to be breakable in our lifetimes (so, I'll say, "ever") is SHA2. Then someone responded that SHA2 wasn't an interesting target. It doesn't have to be; it just has to be man-made, or concede the narrowing of the original claim.
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
kibwen 6 hours ago [-]
> Man can make it; man can break it.
Man can make mathematical proofs that will not be broken. Man is not going to disprove the Pythagorean Theorem. Software is just hifalutin math. There can exist software that, for a given mathematical specification, can be proven correct, and will not be disproven.
weinzierl 8 hours ago [-]
"Our task as the older generation is to shield the young from those who would exploit their naïveté without infecting them with our own accumulated pain and cynicism." [33:53] stuck with me and is my take away.
javcasas 7 hours ago [-]
Shield is the wrong word. At some point, the shield must fall, and then the young are no longer young, but are still näive.
There will always be exploiters, don't believe that they will die once we manage to shield the young for enough time for the exploiters to die of old age.
mdgld 43 minutes ago [-]
Shield them long enough to teach them how to defend themselves, maybe?
jdw64 16 minutes ago [-]
I think Andrew Kelly is just a rockstar. Honestly, I find a lot of his overall perspective hard to understand. I get that he's an idealist.
He talks about developers not standing up to management's unreasonable demands, but doesn't he himself receive donations from wealthy people at his foundation? Everything seems contradictory.
The concept of 'pure will' is also really hard for me to grasp. It feels like trying to bring Plato's Forms into reality.
I always feel like the purity advocates on HN are contradictory. They just try to package their own superiority as purity. Honestly, in what sense are they pure? I don't really get it. Is not using AI somehow superior? Is using a hand drill instead of an electric drill more admirable?
I also know that dark patterns undermine user autonomy. But that has clear limits. It's like Prohibition. I understand the criticism of A/B testing in context, but shouldn't we be criticizing Goodhart's law, trying to hit metrics without understanding user behavior, rather than demonizing the tool itself?
The younger generation never experienced the open web or software sovereignty. How can they give up system convenience and choose free software?
I understand that there are problems arising from the nature of capitalism. And I agree that the world needs ethical brakes. But honestly, what I find hard to understand about this person's argument reminds me of a line from Russian literary criticism: 'Those who praise the land are those who do not farm it.
I acknowledge Andrew Kelly's technical achievements are impressive. But honestly, I find it hard to understand the people on HN who keep echoing his words. The Zig foundation runs on sponsorships from big tech companies.
The development cost of 'free software' paradoxically comes from the 'excessive profits of monopolistic big tech' that they despise.
How is that any different from a high-class courtesan telling a cheap one, 'I'm different'?
Andrew Kelly's words are just a symbol of vicarious satisfaction for cogs in the machine. Not just me, but the vast majority of programmers live as cogs—solving Jira tickets, chasing deadlines and KPIs. To them, Kelly appears as an icon of rebellion, refusing to compromise with reality and preserving his purity. But the irony of rockstars is always that they are the most devoted to capitalism.
When I strip away the halo effect around Andrew Kelly, I can't make sense of the contradictions inside.
fellowniusmonk 11 hours ago [-]
Crazy to see how many people miss 26:15.
gregdaniels421 11 hours ago [-]
This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future.
People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.
If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.
I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
as1mov 10 hours ago [-]
> I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.
Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.
fellowniusmonk 10 hours ago [-]
This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it.
In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code.
I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business".
I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "anti american communism bullshit".
It's ok to be a humanist and not a corporatist.
It's ok to show generosity.
It's ok to reject the crab bucket framing.
Some of us are mature enough to be ok living in a better world even if still imperfect.
bee_rider 9 hours ago [-]
Although, I do with these LLM companies would be better about licensing their derivative works (the models) under GPL, when they ingest GPL’d code.
nz 10 hours ago [-]
The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue.
The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].
To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.
LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.
[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.
986aignan 7 hours ago [-]
> LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.
In addition to giving credit where credit is due, attribution is important for verifying the trustworthiness of "facts". When someone tells me they asked a LLM and it says xxxxx, I want to know did it get it from a bad source, or worse, hallucinated it from thin air. And if it turns out to be good information, I might want to check out other things the guy has written.
At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.
fhdkweig 8 hours ago [-]
And I hope I am just being a Chicken Little, but if LLMs become the go-to place for searching, we will lose traditional web search engines. They won't be profitable if not enough people use them. For those who don't remember how the web was before Google's search engine, we had search engines that really didn't work, web rings, and people's list of random bookmarks. The web is much too complex and big to ever be able to go back to those methods. The web will be effectively unnavigable and dead. All we will have left will be the unattributed knowledge distilled in the LLM with no way back to the old methods. And please tell me I'm wrong.
kazinator 2 hours ago [-]
The issue isn't correctly named "theft", but rather "copyright infringment" and "plagiarism".
Attributions being stripped gives rise to copyright infringement where the license for the material requires that they not be stripped, as a condition of redistribution.
Presenting work as one's own without attribution is plagiarism.
"Theft" is a word that corporate copyright mongers have used to paint people copying a CD as hard criminals.
novaRom 9 hours ago [-]
> It clearly memorized the code
This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).
wannabe44 27 minutes ago [-]
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jasonmp85 5 hours ago [-]
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jagadaga 10 hours ago [-]
I watched 8 minutes and feel like my time was wasted. Thank you.
Yeah, we always knew how to build reliable software, but it's expensive.
dang 9 hours ago [-]
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, shallow criticisms? So far all 3 of your comments have been of this sort, and we're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.
Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a rigorous statistical model of what correlates, and you need to keep that model a secret, while also changing the KPIs periodically, to prevent employees from intuitively overfitting. That whole process would be very expensive (and if it would not, why is nobody doing it).
Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?
jagged-chisel 6 hours ago [-]
> … kept secret from employees [to] mitigate Goodhart's Law
While I empathize with the need for mitigation, secret goals and milestones are an excellent way to mistreat employees and eliminate morale.
nz 6 hours ago [-]
I mean, my point is that we would all be better off without any of the KPIs, and stack-ranking, and so on, in large part because they are not reliable metrics, and making them reliable is itself a difficult problem to solve. You need engineers that seek to understand your business, your problem, and are willing to use that understanding and their experience of building software, to solve those problems in as permanent and correct a way as possible.
The reason this is so difficult to manifest, is that only about 2% to 4.6% of the college-educated population are software engineers at any given point, which means that 95% of all the people that we interact with, have no clue what we are talking about, and do not understand why they cannot have more, more, more, now, now, now. For comparison at least 20% of people have a degree in business. And most of those, in non-concrete roles seem to be cargo-culting their way through a career.
Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.
I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
I think this is largely a pay gap problem. There’s a bit of prestige involved (why work for random corp’s dev dept when you could work at FAANG) but a huge part is that most those random corps are paying way less. The best talent generally goes where the money is.
Maybe working at FAANG should be something to be embarrassed of.
The biggest problem with VC startups is their geographic concentration, but sometimes remote is available.
I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.
(Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)
The bigger issue is not having seen fizzbuzz before, really.
I found most of the people who couldn’t program were not the nervous ones, but were smooth talkers who probably didn’t write much code. Maybe they did at one point, maybe they never did, it was hard to know, but I couldn’t get even logical steps to solve straight forward problems out of them. Those were the worst interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t a fit for the role, but because then I had to panic to try to keep the experience positive, constructive, and collaborative. When I expected to fill 20-40 minutes talking through a problem with someone who can’t solve problems, let alone produce anything remotely looking like code, I always found that painful.
The questions I asked could be solved by non-programmers (my wife, who was an elementary teacher and even my kindergarten son could come up with reasonable solutions, but of course not code). That was probably the biggest issue I ran into with nervous people - they didn’t think about the problem first, they’d try writing code before really thinking through. That was usually easy to correct and I didn’t fault anyone who could handle correction and guidance.
Also I would like to add, that companies in general are quite clueless about how to hire good engineers and set up hiring processes, which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers. Someone not able to write a loop will be found out, but that doesn't mean they won't hire other types of mediocre engineers, instead of good ones, that they gave a pass. Don't forget, that often not even any engineer is involved in taking a look at someone's application or its contents. Often it is HR going off of checklists, which leads to them ending up with the people, who have fake CVs ticking all the boxes.
I wish companies were able to distinguish better, because then your point would stand, that talented engineers had far more leverage. Lately though, I have lost my faith in that.
Part of that is also about who management and HR are socially comfortable with and candidates that may have connections with people in the company. It's often not a level playing field because of cronyism, nepotism, and many other -isms.
That's also why a good engineer, confident in their skills and value, needs to read the room or figure out what's going on. If the situation is not to their liking, then jump to another company or start their own business, whenever the chance presents itself.
I don't think the management at most companies could identify good talent if it poked them in the eye. Good talent wants to have agency and freedom to act, the average manager wants to breathe down your neck at all moments
In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.
Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.
This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.
People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.
...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.
Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall).
Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement in a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit can be had.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 (Tell HN: Site Is Trash Now)
[2]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html (So Long, Twitter and Reddit)
Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.
I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.
Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.
Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.
Can you elaborate on this?
Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.
I love computers.
Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".
Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.
1. You go to the DMV to renew your driver's license at a kiosk there. There's a warrant for your arrest. Should the kiosk serve the user directly interacting with it and print out a new license anyway?
2. Grocery store: should a self-checkout serve the user and give them free groceries?
3. ATM: does the user get free money?
Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian, and I find that to be a message made in poor taste... which is difficult because this is such a potentially inspiring and positive talk. I lost the energy to be inspired by the talk due to this style of messaging, but I don't think you should have to. I'm just a bit thrown off, I guess.
Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.
While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.
This just seems normal and expected.
Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.
It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.
> It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.
Right, but not everyone has the same reaction to members of the new generation who don't conform to their values. When my brothers and I didn't end up participating in organized religion as adults, even though my parents still are fairly religious, their reaction was basically "oh well" and to never bring it up again, and we all still have great relationships with them. There are people whose react to their kids not wanting to participate in the same organized religion much more aggressively, and if their kids have "lifestyles" that they consider immoral like being gay or trans, you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them.
You're not wrong that at a high level, the patterns are somewhat similar, but not all of them are the same magnitude. The values themselves will impact how volatile the conflict is because they're self-describing; parents who highly value tolerance will by definition not be as upset at having kids who don't agree with them on everything, whereas parents who instead place a higher value on conformity and adherence to tradition are going to be a lot less happy with kids who don't end up agreeing with them about that.
Such is life. Not everyone has a family to begin with.
"my parents are/were abusive" is something a plurality of people (and especially those raised in evangelical churches) experience.
Within that dynamic, the 'value' at issue here is 'Do I, your child, have a right to my own body and choices?'; Too often, the reply to that is 'no, we expect obedience and obeisance to God, your father, and your mother, in that exact order, because that is the one true way'.
This is a form of domination, not well-meaning 'protection'. It does, in fact, 'mess people up', in their intimate relationships most of all.
Not sure exactly what you mean by own body. However, under the law children generally do not have a right to their own choices and are expected to be controlled by their parents (really look at the stutes around this stuff and you might be surprised). After all, parents are held responsible for their child's actions under the law.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...
You have stated an unfortunate fact while hiding your value judgement. Do you think the laws you reference are correct, or no?
Do you understand the difference between having a responsibility to prevent your child from law-breaking and having absolute control over their life in general?
If you have children, or plan to, do you want to control every action they take to protect yourself from hypothetical legal consequence? Do you think you have the right to do so? Do you think you should be able to control what they think and express as well?
These questions are not hypothetical, as an answer in the affirmative is precisely what creates the type of abuse I described above.
It’s one thing to try and impart your values onto your children—that seems like what most parents would want to do, although I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s what they should do. It’s another to say, for example, “you were born with a penis and so if I see you wearing a dress I’ll beat you and send you to a camp where people demean you and question your innermost feelings until you change them or pretend to do so”, instead of having a conversation about gender vs sex vs sexual orientation, gender roles, society, and culture, and “nature vs nurture”.
edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.
I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!
Some people aren't yet in a place to understand this perspective. Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. Some slander the faith based on ignorance or misunderstanding.
We're called to forgive our enemies and respond with patience, humility, and compassion. I've found that doing this without losing sight of God's commandments is a struggle that requires daily prayer and reflection.
Have a good weekend, and peace be with you.
It is common for religious people to assume they are linked and that a religious person does good deeds because they are faithful while somebody who does bad deeds has less faith.
Which leads to an assumption by some that atheists are have no morals and priest are exception good.
It's clear that he had a bad experience, and I'm nobody to tell him what to put on the slides and what to leave out, but my impression is that there are lots of believers out there who do cherish their faith, experience it as a very positive force in their lives, and draw from it the power to make the world a better place around them. Speaking for myself, I'd say faith has been a net positive so far in my life.
Most people don't want to learn, so they don't choose to live in the Omniversity.
I was so pre-occupied with someone being offended by what he was saying that I didn't see the clear positive angles you're showing. I appreciate that.
It’s one thing to purposefully provoke people, and it’s another to tiptoe around any personal expression or hot-button issue for fear of offending someone, and that is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. I have been on all sides of this; I was raised by a computer scientist (used to speaking freely/veracity being valued) and a doctor (used to self-censorship/not offending being valued), and have worked in academia, industry, and now medicine, and have experienced conservative as well as liberal approaches to both promulgation and suppression of free expression.
Or maybe it's not an act, and he's just naturally funny :)
> to keep his easy job
He had an easy corporate job. Then he quit and spent half a decade burning his savings to work on his "hobby project", in a belief that one day it would become useful enough that the project would become self-sustainable. Now he can afford air conditioning again. Should we not be congratulating him?
Maybe, as a progressive, you should listen to the experience before rejecting it solely because "it is too divisive".
And if you reject personal experience and feelings solely because they are not pro-comservative-christians enougj, maybe there is issue there
Further, his views on PUA in particular might seem strange from the perspective of someone deep inside “internet culture”, and if this is you, from someone raised as a man, who is attracted to women, and who spent many years in the dark corners of the internet, please give broadening your horizons a try. You may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.
[0]: https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4?si=45knBo2Hsy_6wjEM&t=2092
For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.
Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.
I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).
I hope I can get this out soon
I recently took a consulting engagement with another US public (pink sheets) company and remembered how dysfunctional some software development structures/cultures are.
But in a way that does not diminish his work on Zig.
The main thrust is simple:
- Technology is not good or bad, it is an amplifier of human values and our collective ambitions.
- Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.
- Believing this this is self-fulfilling. By embracing such beliefs you surrender your agency, which is what actually brings about dystopia. If you, instead, have a positive vision of humanity, then you are one of the people that drives society forwards rather than backwards.
We are currently at a moment in history where this message bears repeating.
A lot of things feel unstable, and as a result we have an opportunity to redefine the world in good ways and bad ones. Those who choose to redefine it in ways that are intractably bad will often do so from the point of view of a system observer, not a system participant. This is cope, because in reality everyone, whether they choose to accept it or not, is a system participant.
and while i'm not a massive fan of the music (not my kind of electronic) the mentioned Ninajirachi - Infohazard music video really is fucking cool (strobe warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c i definitely feel like my jaded oldtimer critic got called out there.
edit -- jfc, from one of the youtube comments
> From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”
As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.
The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.
Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release
Right now, that's where my hope rests, it's been a LONG time coming, but I think Genode might become a widely used OS if they can pull it off. If they can break enough people out of being black pilled, that is.[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
[2] https://garden.joehallenbeck.com/container/mappers-and-packe...
[3] https://genode.org/about/road-map
Red pill: The supplier is corrupt and should be treated as such.
Black pill: You can't win against the corrupt supplier.
White pill: You can win/convert the supplier/find a good one in a sea of bad ones/find a complete alternative.
This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.
- Why a collision?
> Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).
Thus implying there are man-made systems that are not breakable, and furthermore SHA-2 is one of them.
> I haven't discarded any date.
Going back so quickly?
Man can make mathematical proofs that will not be broken. Man is not going to disprove the Pythagorean Theorem. Software is just hifalutin math. There can exist software that, for a given mathematical specification, can be proven correct, and will not be disproven.
There will always be exploiters, don't believe that they will die once we manage to shield the young for enough time for the exploiters to die of old age.
He talks about developers not standing up to management's unreasonable demands, but doesn't he himself receive donations from wealthy people at his foundation? Everything seems contradictory.
The concept of 'pure will' is also really hard for me to grasp. It feels like trying to bring Plato's Forms into reality.
I always feel like the purity advocates on HN are contradictory. They just try to package their own superiority as purity. Honestly, in what sense are they pure? I don't really get it. Is not using AI somehow superior? Is using a hand drill instead of an electric drill more admirable?
I also know that dark patterns undermine user autonomy. But that has clear limits. It's like Prohibition. I understand the criticism of A/B testing in context, but shouldn't we be criticizing Goodhart's law, trying to hit metrics without understanding user behavior, rather than demonizing the tool itself?
The younger generation never experienced the open web or software sovereignty. How can they give up system convenience and choose free software?
I understand that there are problems arising from the nature of capitalism. And I agree that the world needs ethical brakes. But honestly, what I find hard to understand about this person's argument reminds me of a line from Russian literary criticism: 'Those who praise the land are those who do not farm it.
I acknowledge Andrew Kelly's technical achievements are impressive. But honestly, I find it hard to understand the people on HN who keep echoing his words. The Zig foundation runs on sponsorships from big tech companies.
The development cost of 'free software' paradoxically comes from the 'excessive profits of monopolistic big tech' that they despise.
How is that any different from a high-class courtesan telling a cheap one, 'I'm different'?
Andrew Kelly's words are just a symbol of vicarious satisfaction for cogs in the machine. Not just me, but the vast majority of programmers live as cogs—solving Jira tickets, chasing deadlines and KPIs. To them, Kelly appears as an icon of rebellion, refusing to compromise with reality and preserving his purity. But the irony of rockstars is always that they are the most devoted to capitalism.
When I strip away the halo effect around Andrew Kelly, I can't make sense of the contradictions inside.
People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.
If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.
I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.
Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.
In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code.
I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business".
I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "anti american communism bullshit".
It's ok to be a humanist and not a corporatist.
It's ok to show generosity.
It's ok to reject the crab bucket framing.
Some of us are mature enough to be ok living in a better world even if still imperfect.
The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].
To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.
LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.
[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.
And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.
[1] https://bactra.org/research/2026-03-10.html
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03296
At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.
Attributions being stripped gives rise to copyright infringement where the license for the material requires that they not be stripped, as a condition of redistribution.
Presenting work as one's own without attribution is plagiarism.
"Theft" is a word that corporate copyright mongers have used to paint people copying a CD as hard criminals.
This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Note this one: "Don't be snarky."
Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?
While I empathize with the need for mitigation, secret goals and milestones are an excellent way to mistreat employees and eliminate morale.
The reason this is so difficult to manifest, is that only about 2% to 4.6% of the college-educated population are software engineers at any given point, which means that 95% of all the people that we interact with, have no clue what we are talking about, and do not understand why they cannot have more, more, more, now, now, now. For comparison at least 20% of people have a degree in business. And most of those, in non-concrete roles seem to be cargo-culting their way through a career.